Merdas Touch - worst workplace disaster

Esho

When everything they touch turns to sh1t ...

What is the worst human made disaster you've seen at work?

In my case, this person was me, when I got my first software development job. Not as bad as leaving the Port Tunnel a foot to small but...

Completely confident in my skills, I decided to make a change to the live system to fix a minor problem the sales team were having - "it'll be fine, it worked on my machine".

Seconds after I clicked "OK", phones started to ring and emails started to ping in - I had knocked out the sales app, stopping retail sales going through across the whole country, at terminals where there was a always a queue.

Everyone turned around to look at me, and my boss elbowed me out to of way, and asked me what the fcuk I'd done.

Took half an hour to fix it, and two years before something else happened to take the smell off me.

Mister Vain

I've seen some bad ones in warehouses. The worst one was a guy moving a very tall pallet under an archway with a pallet truck. The top of the pallet hit the archway and knocked the entire wall down. The wall was beside a production line and it was only pure luck that the staff were on break at the time.

The worst I ever did myself was accidentally set a forklift on fire when I tried to raise the forks not realising the power cable was wrapped around it.

z80CPU

The Windows 11 October Cumulative update from Microsoft fùcked up my Asus Rog machine : the laptop is now decommissioned by me

The goons at Microsoft got off scott free : go to Microsoft support for the issue and while there is a trickle in of reports from real users ( the forum is not astro turffed as regularly as other hardware companies like Samsung do you always receive a reciprocal " positive review " by a " John Doe " :

" I followed all the steps listed in a previous answer by A N Other and the update completed just fine on my own laptop : Just do this very carefully on your own machine and everything will work out hunky dory "

ok.

JohnCleary

In before... Chernobyl

Esho

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121362358#Comment_121362358

I got shivers reading that.

Strumms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121362358#Comment_121362358

Loads of stuff on YouTube, warehouse / forklift disasters… some mind blowing levels of just bad luck and or incompetence…..

Look at this… fukkkkkk..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZD40qcrecg

Ten of Swords

Probably not what the op had in mind but...

The Paria Pipeline incident gives me chills, it happened in February 2022.

5 divers contracted to perform maintenance on an oil pipeline in Trinidad were sucked into a 30 inch pipeline at the bottom of the harbor due to a pressure differential they were not told about (the pipe should have been full which would have maintained equal pressure when they released the seals but the pipe had been emptied and nobody was told)

The below youtube video explains it, I couldn't do it justice. Only 1 man got out by himself, the other 4 were left in the pipe by the company who, it is alleged, decided not to proceed with a rescue attempt. The bodies were recovered later. One of the divers had a go pro camera, the footage is terrifying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDjODRpuXrU

The mother of one of the dead men, Kazim Ali, is Irish (from Limerick)

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/limerick-mother-claims-fuel-company-kept-husband-from-rescuing-son-in-diving-tragedy-1427429.html

Pherekydes

Worst workplace disaster was probably the Tramore Dauphin crash, with the loss of 4 colleagues.

bodhrandude

An appropriate place to pop this clip, The Dubliners - The Sick Note.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Vfxuk8x_A

bnt

I started a work placement when I was an apprentice, arriving on site a couple of days after a major accident that killed two people and badly injured several more. So I didn't see it myself, but people were traumatised. What happened took a bit of explaining - so much that I haven't forgotten it since.

This was an alloys factory that used massive transformers to step down high voltage / low current to low voltage / high current. The output was only about 100V but with current measured in tens of thousands of amps. They had to work on a transformer, so they followed all the safety protocols on the high voltage side - that part was fine, no danger there. However, they didn't disconnect or ground the secondary (low voltage) side. Someone else did some welding on the secondary bus bars with a big AC welder, which was also low voltage. That welding voltage got stepped up and came out the primary side of the transformer with enough power to kill.